I’m feeling vindicated today, one of the ideas I’ve had for a while is that there’s a market for making affordable housing out of old train carriages, airplanes fuselages, shipping containers etc. Useful for areas where the prices make it difficult to get started on the property ladder or just where there’s a demand for easy, cheap, small footprint housing. Mostly people have scoffed at this idea — I get that a lot — but it’s actually happening. Here’s a SFGate.com article about shipping containers and here’s a proposed design for a library using recycled airplanes. I can’t find anything about railway carriages but the same ideas could apply to them. A lot of these ideas might seem a bit strange, but I think that there’s a lot of potential in unorthodox housing ideas. I just need to come up with something that’s not already been done.
Of course, they’re not really recycling the containers or the airplanes, essentially they’re downcycling them. This stage is the end of the life cycle, we’re just postponed the eventual disposal, and it takes significant resources to adapt them to their new use. Imagine if, say, train carriages where designed for eventual easy conversion to housing, or some other purpose, once they’d served their time in their first use. Instead of designing things fit for one purpose, design things that have an entire life cycle built in. For more, or just to find out where I swiped the term downcycling from, read Cradle to Cradle.
That little bit inspired by a post on Treehugger. Also from there, and almost too late, I discovered that Green Design: Creativity with a Conscience is on at the National Museum of Scotland. It ends this Sunday, but I might still get a chance to go have a look.
Speaking of things that I’ll probably never get round to seeing, the Edinburgh Book Festival launched it’s 2006 listing today. If you’ve read my previous comments about listings sites you can guess what I think of that one so I’ll skip that part and just say I gave up looking for things. I’ll pick up a paper copy at some point.
Try as I might I can’t make that link into my final bit so just have a look at a Little Illusion that’s been doing the rounds on the web. It’s pretty cool and he’s got a nice tutorial showing how to create the effect from your own photos.